Gazzara became well known in several television series, beginning with Arrest and Trial, which ran from 1963 to 1964 on ABC, and the more-successful series Run for Your Life
from 1965-68 on NBC, in which he played a terminally ill man trying to
get the most out of the last two years of his life. For his work in the
series, Gazzara received two Emmy nominations for “Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series” and three Golden Globe nominations for “Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series – Drama.”[5][6] Contemporary screen credits included The Young Doctors (1961), A Rage to Live (1965) and The Bridge at Remagen (1969).

Gazzara told Charlie Rose
in 1998 that he went from being mainly a stage actor who often would
turn up his nose at film roles in the mid-1950s to, much later, a
ubiquitous character actor who turned very little down. “When I became
hot, so to speak, in the theater, I got a lot of offers,” he said. “I
won’t tell you the pictures I turned down because you’ll say, ‘You are a
fool,’ and I was a fool.”

Some of the actor’s most formidable characters were those he created with his friend John Cassavetes in the 1970s. They collaborated for the first time on Cassavetes’s film Husbands (1970), in which he appeared alongside Peter Falk and Cassavetes himself. In The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
(1976), Gazzara took the leading role of the hapless strip-joint owner,
Cosmo Vitelli. A year later, he starred in yet another
Cassavetes-directed movie, Opening Night, as stage director Manny Victor, who struggles with the mentally unstable star of his show, played by Cassavetes’s wife Gena Rowlands. Also during this period he appeared in the television miniseries QB VII (1974), and the films Capone (1975), Voyage of the Damned (1976), High Velocity (1976), and Saint Jack (1979).

Gazzara at premiere of Looking for Palladin, New York City, October 30, 2009

In his seventies, Gazzara continued to be active. In 2003, he was in the ensemble cast of the experimental film Dogville, directed by Lars von Trier of Denmark and starring Nicole Kidman, as well as the television film Hysterical Blindness (he received his first Emmy Award for his role). Several other projects have recently been completed or are currently in production. In 2005, he played Agostino Casaroli in the television miniseries, Pope John Paul II. He completed filming his scenes in the film The Wait in early 2012, shortly before his death.[7]

Other

Gazzara was the honorary starter of the 1979 Daytona 500, the first flag-to-flag Daytona 500 broadcast live on CBS. He was also featured in a 1994 article in Cigar Aficionado, in which he admitted smoking four packs of cigarettes a day until taking up cigar smoking in the mid-1960s.[3]

Death

Gazzara was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1999. On February 3, 2012, he died of pancreatic cancer at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York.[13]